Second TRIANGLE testbed release brings 5G closer for mobile testers

The next release of the TRIANGLE testbed is about to be open to third parties for testing mobile applications and devices and is bringing exciting new features! We are delighted to announce the second release of the testbed coming onstream in October 2017.

On the usability of the testbed, TRIANGLE has improved its user interface for testers, to ease and improve the execution of complex campaigns over a fully configurable mobile network. TRIANGLE has furthermore obtained KPIs from the measurement points of the testbed and defined a set of ETL (extract, transform and load) transformations to extract data from the device or application under test and convert it to a useful parameter for evaluation. These transformations provide advanced metrics to the tester and ultimately will evolve the testing to a TRIANGLE mark or certification in the third release.

Additionally, more complex domains are now supported thanks to the addition of a robotic arm and GPS emulation. The robotic arm can be programmed to perform user defined movements, and the GPS feature hooks emulated satellite signals into the GPS antenna, enabling the emulation of a user-defined geographical route. With these two new features in the TRIANGLE testbed, we are now ready to hunt down Pókemon anywhere in the world!

On the measurement side of the testbed, instrumentation of the different testbed elements has been improved. The instrumentation now supports the remote capture of packets in any testbed interface. This enables the extraction of advanced measurements such as estimation of the control plane latency. These measurements can be used to characterize the amount of time consumed by a UE when registering on the network, such as coming back from energy save mode, etc. Time synchronization is also a feature of this second testbed release where all the network elements will be synchronized using the IEEE-1588 precision time protocol.

Finally, the network architecture of the testbed is also evolving with the inclusion of heterogeneous technologies such as controllable Wi-Fi access points to provide aggregation of LTE and Wi-Fi data.

We are currently using a very mature prototype to explore mobile edge computing which is on the testbed roadmap, and which we have also targeted in the open calls of the TRIANGLE project.

And stay tuned as there is still more functionality coming in the third release of the testbed, which will support TRIANGLE mark certification campaigns.